Let's travel through time and space to colorful Giverny, France in the summer. Claude Monet made his home at Giverny for over 40 years, until his death in 1926. In the warm season, you can visit his house and studio, as well as the famous flowerbeds and reflecting pond that inspired his sublime paintings. To visit [...]
Read MoreI went to the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition looking for calm. It’s been an intense week; the semester is halfway over, which means the projects for my seminars need to be at a certain point of completion. When I saw that I had an hour-long pocket in my schedule on Tuesday, I decided to fill it with some Toulouse-Lautrec [...]
Read MoreI recently had the pleasure of visiting the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts with its musical audioguide. The first stop on the audio tour was a French statue of the Virgin and Child from the 14th century. The cult of the Virgin Mary was very common in both the visual and musical cultures of that time. This [...]
Read MoreElisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun was a celebrated 18th century French portraitist and one of the most important women artists of all time. I had the pleasure of seeing the exhibition dedicated to her life and work at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa (the exhibition also took place at the Grand Palais and the Met). This is the first retrospective and only the second exhibition devoted to Vigée Le Brun in [...]
Read MoreDo you ever find yourself in a museum, looking but not seeing? This happened to me recently on my three-day retreat in the Metropolitan Museum. On my second morning, I was wandering from gallery to gallery, and I couldn’t quite register what I was seeing. I was so inundated with beauty that it was all blurring together. That’s when I decided to go on a photo safari, a trick in my museum toolbox that [...]
Read MoreThe Louvre Abu Dhabi will open in December 2015, but you can see the museum's first acquisitions now, on display in an exhibition at the 'Louvre Paris’. In 2007, an intergovernmental agreement was signed between France and the United Arab Emirates [ ... ]
Read MoreA French friend came to visit my childhood home over the Christmas holidays this year. It was his first time visiting the great US of A, and I wanted to shock him with the cultural differences between our two countries. I took him to an enormous Costco, I made him drink a Root Beer Float, we almost got run over by [ ... ]
Read MoreThe Fourth of July of 2012 fell on a Wednesday. This meant that the official party would have to wait for July 6. But a friend and I decided to have a quiet pre-celebration in Place Saint-Sulpice on that Wednesday night, equipped with a 12-pack of sparklers. We each pinned on a cocarde tricolore (ignoring that they [ ... ]
Read MoreToulouse is known as la ville rose due to the pink bricks used to construct many of its buildings. The Musée des Augustins is no exception. Built in 1309 as a Augustinian convent, today the building houses a collection of paintings and sculptures from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century. The galleries [ … ]
Read MoreThis is part of Louvre Photo Safaris, a series that focuses on details found in Louvre artworks around various themes, with the aim of looking at everything differently. Hands reach out, they touch, they manipulate. They can be used to cradle an infant, to turn a page, to cry out to God. In the Louvre’s collection of French [ ... ]
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This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer.
IMAGINIBUS is a blog about playing in museums, with a focus on imagination and creativity.
This blog is a place to be inspired to use your imagination around artworks—and to see the art of your daily life.
When we engage creatively with art, museums can become playgrounds and laboratories to experiment with attention, mindfulness, and imagination. Interesting things happen when we use that museum gaze to look at our daily lives like a work of art.
Find more inspiration for playing with new ways of paying attention to your daily life here.
Hello! I'm Marina Gross-Hoy, a writer, Museum Studies PhD candidate, and mother currently living in Quebec. I take playing in museums very seriously.
Read more about the blog here.
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